Ralph Erskine pointed out to me that the Coral was mainly used
by Japanese naval attaches and that the relevant histories of this system do
not mention it being used for transmitting Allied cipher material. Further
research at the US National Archives and Records Administration revealed that
the code used for transmitting solved Allied cipher material was JAT, a letter code used together with a
Gronsfeld square and a book containing random 4-figure groups.

I’ve corrected the relevant passage in my essay and added
scans from the document ‘JAT write up -
selections from JMA traffic'.

During WWII
the military forces of the Allies and the Axis battled in Europe and Asia but
behind the scenes there were efforts to negotiate some sort of compromise
peace. These efforts however never amounted to much since both sides distrusted
each other and the military situation made it clear that the Allies could win
the war through military force alone.

Since the
1930’s a segment of German society that opposed the National-Socialist regime had
tried to establish contact with foreign countries in order to topple Hitler. During
the war the same groups contacted US and British officials in neutral countries
and tried to gain their support in order to remove the NS regime from power.
The Western Allies were aware of these efforts but they did not offer material
support to the members of the German
resistance.

At
the same time elements of the NS regime came to realize that the war was lost and
thus made cautious attempts to contact Allied officials that could promote some
sort of compromise peace. Heinrich Himmler was
leader of the SS security service and thus one of the most powerful men in Nazi
Germany. Yet by 1943 he was beginning to realize that hopes for a successful
conclusion of the war were slim. His subordinate General Walter Schellenberg,
head of the foreign intelligence department of the Sicherheitsdienst,
had many talks with Himmler on the need for a compromise peace and in 1943 he
was able to make the first attempts at contacting Allied officials.

The Germans knew that Allen Dulles was in charge of the OSS-Office of Strategic Services
station in Bern, Switzerland and they chose to contact him through people
associated with the German resistance.

In early 1943 Prince Max
Hohenlohe (working on behalf of the Sicherheitsdienst)
was given permission to travel to Switzerland and meet Dulles. Unfortunately it
doesn’t seem like their meeting remained a secret for long. In the Finnish
national archives one can find the decoded version of message No 2.181 of April
7, 1943, giving an overview of their discussion.

The original is available from the US National Archives and
Records Administration - collection RG 59.

Both the German resistance (through Admiral Canaris) and the Sicherheitsdienst
(through Schellenberg) had warned Dulles that his communications were
compromised but it doesn’t seem like he acted on this information. These
efforts for a compromise peace were probably doomed from the start (especially
since the Germans seemed to have overestimated the influence of Dulles) but
even so without secure communications the talks could not have remained secret
for long.

Friday, January 9, 2015

Alan
Turing was a legendary mathematician and a pioneer in the field of computer
science. During WWII he worked for the Government
Code and Cypher School, analyzing and solving Axis codes. His main achievement
at GCCS was the solution of the plugboard Enigma,
used widely by the German armed forces. Turing was undeniably a genius and
after the war he continued his research into computers but in 1952 he got in
trouble with the authorities after a police investigation into the break-in of
his apartment revealed that the culprit knew Turing and had a homosexual
relationship with him. Since homosexuality was a crime both men were convicted
of ‘gross indecency’ and Turing had
to undergo hormonal treatment. His conviction affected not only his personal
life but also his professional opportunities. In 1954 Turing was found dead in
his apartment, apparently the victim of cyanide poisoning. There is speculation
on whether this was an accident or a suicide.

From the information presented so far it is clear that
Turing was a fascinating individual and a movie about him was long overdue but
is ‘The imitation game’ up to the challenge?

What I expected to
see

Since I’ve read quite a lot on WWII cryptology and signals
intelligence there are some events that I expected to see in the movie, not
only because they would add realism to the film but also because they prove
that truth is stranger than fiction. What are they?

Polish
codebreakers: In the 1930’s
the British and French codebreakers, despite their best efforts, were unable to
solve the plugboard Enigma. If countries with great resources and a long tradition
in cryptanalysis could not solve this device one would expect that no one else
could have succeeded, especially a smaller country with limited resources. Yet contrary
to all expectations the Polish codebreakers had not only managed to figure out the
operating principle of the Enigma but had succeeded in retrieving the rotor
wrings and then solved the internal settings of several networks. They managed
to keep this a secret not only from the Germans but also from their close
allies! They only revealed their success to the French and British
representatives in July 1939 and thus helped them immensely in their
codebreaking work.

Gordon Welchman and the diagonal board: Welchman was a talented
mathematician who worked on the Enigma with success, eventually running Hut 6,
responsible for German Army and Airforce Enigma trafffic. Welchman’s great
contribution was coming up with the idea of the diagonal board. Turing’s bombes
were modified to add the diagonal board which made them much more efficient in
their operation. As Gordon puts it in ‘The Hut Six story’, p304: ‘Turing, though initially incredulous, was
quick to appreciate the importance of this new twist in Enigma theory, which
greatly reduced the number of bombe runs that would be needed to ensure success
in breaking an Enigma key by means of a crib’

Naval Enigma –
Lofoten raid: By 1940 the
British codebreakers were routinely solving current Enigma traffic, mainly from
Luftwaffe networks. Against the naval Enigma however they had made little
progress because the device was used in a more secure manner (additional rotors
and use of enciphered message indicators). By March ’41 their only operational
success had been the solution of the Enigma ‘key’ for 5 days of 1938 and 6 days
in April 1940. In order to force this deadlock the Brits decided to put
statistics on the side and use brute force instead! In March 1941 a commando
raid was mounted against the German forces in the Norwegian Lofoten islands with the goal of capturing Enigma cipher material (monthly keylists and
indicator tables). This operation was a success with material retrieved from the
German armed trawler Krebs. This material allowed Hut 8 to decrypt the
February traffic during March. Then thanks to the intelligence gained from this
‘break’ they were able to solve the April and May traffic cryptanalytically.

4-rotor naval Enigma/4-rotor US bombe: In
February 1942 the U-boat command stopped using the 3-rotor Enigma and instead
introduced a modified 4-rotor version. This was much more secure than the 3-rotor
version and immediately put an end to the British success. British and American
efforts to solve it failed again and again. By December 1942 only 3 days
traffic had been broken. This failure had strained relations between British
codebreakers and the US navy’s OP-20-G. It was obvious that new 4-rotor
‘bombes’ were needed but the British reassurance that these would be soon
introduced failed to materialize. The Americans then decided to build their own
‘bombes’ at the National Cash Register Corporation under engineer Joseph Desch. It was a
good thing they did because the British 4-rotor ‘bombe’ design turned out to be
problematic.

Are these events
mentioned in the actual movie? Let’s see.

‘The imitation
game’

The movie starts with the police investigation in 1952 and
then takes us back to 1939 when Turing first visited GCCS. There he had to solve
the Enigma while facing the hostility of Commander Denniston and the other
cryptanalysts. Everyone thinks that Turing is a failure but eventually his
‘wacky’ idea to build a machine in order to decode a machine finally works and
immediately the British know of the location of every German U-boat in the
Atlantic. However they decide not to sink them all because that would alert the
Germans. In fact Turing stops them from notifying an Allied convoy of an
impending attack even though the brother of one of his fellow cryptanalysts is
on board. Turing with the help of Stewart Menzies keeps
his success with the Enigma a secret from the military authorities and also
from Commander Denniston because he fears that they will misuse it. Instead he
decides to use statistical theory in order to find where the Enigma
intelligence should be used to have the best effect on the war effort. Having
won the war on his own Turing then goes back to teaching and the movie shows
how much he suffered from the police investigation and the hormonal therapy,
leading to his accident/suicide.

Yeah….

The movie is definitely entertaining with great actors,
great sets, great cinematography etc. However the storyline isn’t just
exaggerated in parts or simplified for the general audience. We’re talking
about huge errors and strange conspiracy theories being shown to viewers who
probably don’t know any better.

Am I exaggerating? Someone can counter that it’s not a
documentary, it’s a movie. Let’s have look at the failures of the film in more
detail. Grab a beer, coffee, tea, whatever works for you because you’ll need it…

Turing definitely wasn’t an average person and obviously had
his idiosyncrasies, however the film makes him look completely helpless in his interactions
with other people. Maybe the producers thought that the average viewer would
only appreciate how smart Turing was by making him autistic.

Bletchley Park = Four guys and a pub

I thought that Bletchley Park was a huge organization with
thousands of people working on Axis codes. Apparently I was wrong. According to
the movie Bletchley Park consisted of four cryptanalysts (Turing included) and
a rather homely pub. Oh, there’s also a storehouse where they keep the bombe
ehh i mean ‘Christopher’.

Some books claim that the bombe was built by Harold Keen, the chief
engineer of the British Tabulating Machine Company based on Turing’s designs.
These books are wrong (according to the movie). The bombe was built by Turing
himself with no assistance from anyone else.

Where are the Poles?

I’ve said earlier that the first to succeed with the
military Enigma were the Polish
codebreakers. For some reason the movie doesn’t acknowledge their success.
When at the beginning of the movie Turing meets Commander Denniston he is told
that everyone considers the Enigma unbreakable. This is after September 1939
because in the first scenes we hear the declaration of war between Germany and
UK. Yet in July 1939 the Polish had
revealed their success to the Brits and French.

Later in the movie
when MacGyver Turing is building his bombe he says that his machine was
inspired by an old Polish machine but is infinitely more advanced. This is not
explained further nor is any reference made to the Polish solution. In fact the
Turing bombe was not necessarily infinitely
more advanced from the Polish device, it basically worked on a different
principle.

Where’s Gordon?

Apparently Gordon Welchman never existed. However the diagonal
board is mentioned once without explaining how it works. In the movie it is
discovered by Hugh
Alexander.

Turing industries: Build first - figure out how it works
later

In real life Turing came up with the idea of exploiting a
‘crib’ (suspected plaintext in the ciphertext) in the Enigma traffic and built
a device around that idea. In the movie Turing starts building the bombe as
soon as he arrives at Bletchley Park. Yet he only figures out cribbing much
later thanks to Joan Clarke!!!
What was he building all that time?

Where are the Americans?

The movie doesn’t make any reference to the new 4-rotor
Enigma introduced in 1942 in the U-boat command. No mention is made of the
technologically advanced US 4-rotor bombes.

The Enigma panopticon

According to the movie once they finally solved the settings
for a day they easily found the locations of all the enemy submarines in the
Atlantic. No mention is made of difficulties in interpreting messages, delays
in decoding, lack of traffic or failure to decode. Yet decoding naval messages
didn’t mean that someone could get their coordinates since they were enciphered
with a manual system before being enciphered once more on the Enigma. As
I’ve written in B-Dienst
vs Bletchley Park - The invasion of Norway and the Battle of the Atlantic ‘Coordinates were taken from a grid table.
From June ’41 coordinates were further disguised by using fixed reference
points on the grid table. From November ’41 an Adressbuch was used to encipher
the grid references’. The coordinates problem was only mastered by the
Allies in June 1944 when they captured an Adressbuch from U-boat U-505.

Conspiracy theories

The biggest problem I have with the movie is that it repeats
some strange theories that probably belong in a conspiracy forum rather than a
serious film.

The first one is that the Allies only used Ultra
intelligence when their statistical
theory??? showed that it would have a big impact on the war situation. In
the film they show a whole convoy being abandoned to the U-boats because had
they changed its course the Germans would have found out about Bletchley Park.
In real life Ultra intelligence was used on ALL fronts. Every measure was taken
to ensure secrecy and only the top commanders were fully indoctrinated into the
secret but the intelligence WAS used. For example what did the Brits do when (thanks
to captured keylists) in summer 1941 they started solving U-boats messages with
little time lag? They rerouted all
their convoys around U-boat concentrations. Only 5 of 26 SC convoys, 2 of 31 HX
convoys and 3 of 49 ON convoys were attacked…

The other weird theory promoted by the movie is that the
Soviet spy John Cairncross was known all along to the British security
services. In fact Menzies tells Turing that it was him that allowed Cairncross to
come to Bletchley Park so that he could send valuable intelligence to their
ally Stalin. I guess no one can touch those British superspies. They can never
lose. Even if you manage to get a spy into their organizations it’s only
because they know about it and they allow it….

More mistakes

From the first scenes it’s clear that Commander Denniston
doesn’t like Turing. He really, really
doesn’t like him. Perhaps Turing fought for the Starks…

When the Enigma device is first shown Denniston says that
Polish intelligence smuggled one out of Berlin. Nope. The first Enigma was
captured in February 1940 from U-boat U-33.

The movie shows Enigma being used by U-boats, which is
correct but it also shows Luftwaffe bombers sending messages which is not
correct. Aircraft used hand ciphers for sending messages.

A U-boat is shown attacking warships while underwater. Not
accurate. U-boats usually approached on the surface and their main goal was to
sink merchant ships not warships.

The movie says in the beginning that thanks to the U-boats
Britain was starving. Bullshit.

When Turing decides not to use the Enigma intelligence in
fear of alerting the Germans Keira Knightley says: ‘they’ll have changed the design of Enigma by the weekend’. In fact
the Germans were planning to replace the Enigma with a new device during the
war but they never managed it due to production problems.

Thursday, January 8, 2015

It’s not
often that movies on WWII cryptology and signals intelligence appear on the big
screen, probably because the subject matter is too complex for the general
audience. A new movie, called ‘The
imitation game’ has been released and it has received a lot of favorable
reviews in the media. The movie focuses on the legendary mathematician Alan Turing and his efforts
to solve the German Enigma cipher machine.

First let’s have a look at the trailer

Hmmm the movie certainly looks good (sets, costumes etc) and
the main actors are all well known (Cumberbatch, Knightley, Strong) but the
problems start to add up…

1). At 0:21: ‘It’s the
greatest encryption device in history and the Germans use it for all
communications’.

Ehm, I don’t know what greatest
encryption device means but the military Enigma was not revolutionary in
any sense. It was simply a clever modification of the commercial version, sold
to companies and countries around the world. In fact the Brits had their own
Enigma version called Typex.
As for the second part the Germans use it
for all communications it’s also wrong. The Germans used hand ciphers for
low level messages, the Enigma at regiment/division level and also by naval
units and airbases and cipher teleprinters for communications between higher
commands. So the Enigma did not cover all
German communications.

3).At 1:15 ‘I’m designing a machine that will allow us
to break every message, every day, instantly’.

Bullshit. Sorry but there’s no other way to put it…I
understand that some parts of Enigma theory need to be ‘dumbed’ down so that
the general audience will enjoy the movie but come on! The bombe devices couldn’t break every message, every day and they
certainly couldn’t do it instantly. Running ‘cribs’ took time and under the
best conditions solutions could be achieved in several hours. Under the worst
it could take days, weeks or possibly never…

Even when the Enigma settings were retrieved it wasn’t
possible to read the message instantly. Someone had to type the message on the
specially modified Typex devices and write down the deciphered text. Without
good ‘cribs’ the bombes didn’t work. Simple as that.

3).At 1:20: ‘They had to create the world’s first
computer’

……….The bombes were not general purpose computing devices. Apparently
the producers of the film were thinking of the ‘Collosus’ but this
was a different device, built by different people, for the solution of a
different cipher machine, NOT the Enigma.

4). At 1:29: Fake rivalry between Turing and Denniston.

Historically inaccurate but I guess they had to insert some
kind of conflict in the story for the general audience.

5). At 1:50: ‘The Navy
thinks that one of us is a Soviet spy’.

Again historically inaccurate. There was a Soviet spy at
Bletchley Park, John
Cairncross but he was not a cryptanalyst and he didn’t work with Turing.

So in only 2 and a half minutes we’ve seen some serious
mistakes. On the other hand maybe I’m nitpicking here. So how does the actual movie hold up? We’ll
get to that in the next post.

I wrote: How bad was the compromise of the State
Department’s high level system? That question is hard to answer because
there is limited information available and it doesn’t seem like the Americans
were really interested in learning the full extent of the compromise. Some
documents that would shed more light on this affair are proving very hard to
find…

It is clear
that Germans, Japanese and Finns were able to solve many alphabet strips both
circular and special and thus read State Department messages from embassies in
Europe and Asia. The most important intercepted messages seem to have been
those from Bern, Switzerland and Chungking, China.

Unfortunately
several important reports are still classified by the NSA and we have to wait for
the declassification procedure. At the same time I haven’t been able to track
down the Carlson-Goldsberry
report, detailing the Finnish solution of the State Department strip cipher.
This report was written in late 1944 by two US cryptanalysts after interviewing
Finnish codebreakers in Sweden.

Another
aspect of this case concerns the messages from the OSS
- Office of Strategic Services
and OWI
- Office of War Informationstations in Bern that were also sent via diplomatic channels. It’s not
clear why these messages were sent using State department codes and not through
their own systems. In this area information is lacking, since the OSS organization
doesn’t seem to have officially acknowledged the compromise of their
communications during the war.

2). NKVD 5th Department
codebreakers

During WWII
the Soviet Union invested significant resources in the interception and
exploitation of enemy radio traffic. The internal security service NKVD
and the Army’s general staff had codebreaking departments with the former
recruiting many talented mathematicians. According to author Matthew Aid ‘By the end of World War II, the 5th
Directorate controlled the single largest concentration of mathematicians and
linguists in the Soviet Union.’

So far very limited information is available regarding their war time
efforts versus foreign codes (not only Axis but also US, UK and those of
neutral countries).

3). Referat Vauck success

In the period
1942-44 the German Army’s signal intelligence agency Inspectorate 7/VI had a
separate deparment (Referat 12) assigned with the solution of the encoded
messages of Allied spy groups operating in occupied Europe. Head of the
department was dr Wilhelm Vauck, so his unit was also called Referat Vauck. In 1944 they were transferred to the OKW
radio defense department so their reports can no longer be found in the files
of Inspectorate 7/VI.

I had written about this case: How successful were they during the
war? Unfortunately we do not know. The relevant file in the British national
archives HW 40/76 ‘Enemy exploitation of SIS and SOE codes and cyphers’ says
that postwar files have been retained and my request for the release of the
interrogations of dr Vauck has been rejected by the archives staff

Thankfully I‘ve been able to track down the monthly reports of Referat 12 for the period April ’42-February
’44 and I will be writing an essay on them.

An
interesting discovery, made while I was trying to find information on Referat
Vauck, was that OKW/Chi was also solving Allied agents codes during the war (with
significant success it seems). Not much is known about this aspect of
OKW/Chi operations…

4). Forschungsamt
information

Goering’s Forschungsamt
was one of the main German codebreaking/intelligence agencies of the period 1939-45,
yet a
detailed history of that organization still eludes us. This is another case
where it’s up to the NSA to declassify the relevant documents, written by Forschungsamt
personnel in the 1950’s.

5). German
Enigma investigations

Several
authors claim that the Germans never suspected that their Enigma cipher machine
was solved by the Allies and that they considered it to be unbreakable.

I had
written: The Germans constantly evaluated
the security of their Enigma cipher machine. There were many studies on whether
the daily key or parts of it could be retrieved through cryptanalysis. Those
studies are the TICOM DF-190 to DF-190AN files…..More research is needed to
evaluate the German methods and the way they influenced their security
measures.

The Coral machine was used by military
attaches and the Anglo-Americans solved it in 1944. In the same year dr
Steinberg of the German Army’s signal intelligence agency was transferred to
OKW/Chi where he worked on a cipher machine used by the Japanese attaché. Did
he manage to solve it?

TICOM report I-64 ‘Answers by Wm.
Buggisch ofOKH/Chi
to Questions sent by TICOM’ says ‘B. thinks Steinberg (of
209 fame) solved some Jap machine traffic which was difficult but not so hard
as Enigma. B. thinks it was traffic of the Jap Military Attache.’

There is
scattered information that points towards the solution of an important Japanese
code or cipher machine in the period 1943/44 but no conclusive evidence. Maybe
more information will become available in the future.

7). Soviet
diplomatic code

I wrote: The Soviet Union used a code enciphered with
one time pads as its main diplomatic system during WWII. This system if used
correctly is unbreakable.

The recently
declassified TICOM report DF-111 ‘Comments on various
cryptologic matters’ by Adolf Paschke (head of the linguistic cryptanalysis
group in the German foreign ministry’s decryption department) says that in the
years 1927-30 parts of the Soviet diplomatic traffic could be read since the
additive pads were sometimes used twice if the message was long enough. Paschke
had also identified the use of the same additive tables more than once in some
links. Regarding wartime traffic he says that they couldn’t solve any since
there were no repetitions but in the report he also added cryptically that
Russian material of the Forschungsamt and the High Command’s deciphering
department OKW/Chi were destroyed in 1943 during a bombing attack on Berlin.

Although the
Germans might have not solved any Soviet diplomatic traffic they did succeed in
solving Comintern
communications.